By Chris Trotter*It is difficult to see the Arts Council’s decision to defund Shakespeare as anything other than “propaganda of the deed”. The notion that the Council’s decision was a carefully targeted ideological strike is further buttressed by the comments attached to its refusal. Every year the Sheilah Winn Shakespeare festival invites secondary school students to compete for the best interpretation of an excerpt drawn from a Shakespeare play. In other words: “in this time and place and landscape” and absent the most powerful institutional and/or commercial patrons, Pakeha applicants should expect to be refused Creative New Zealand funding. Shakespeare and his works are downgraded and rejected precisely because his words and his plays connect us to the past – revealing the tragi-comic continuity of human existence.

Source: New Zealand Herald October 17, 2022 05:00 UTC